


Battle Fatigue

by Sonora



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Implied Relationships, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:25:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3286892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From this prompt at <a href="http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/20598.html?thread=49373814#t49373814">AvengerKink</a>.</p><p>Erik enlists Charles' help to rescue the Winter Soldier from behind the Iron Curtain.  But a physical retrieval means nothing if Charles can't pull Bucky Barnes back out from the fortress he's built for himself in his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battle Fatigue

**Author's Note:**

> I tried a couple of different styles to tell this story with, but settled on this. Hope it works! I'm not sure how to tag and/or warn on this... if I left something out that should be here, please let me know.
> 
> (Also, Zola "transferred" himself in 1972, and DoFP takes place in 1973, and I don't think pre-DoFP Erik would be up to anything much, so this is set in 1974. Zola could transfer himself and live out the rest of his life. And sure, Erik killed some people, but Charles would still help him if he presented his case properly. Right? Right. I'm going with it.)

“When we beat the Nazis, we should do some traveling,” Steve says, laying flat on his back in the bed they insist to the rest of the team that they have to share. Lack of billets and all that, even here. “Go see Italy and Egypt. I hear they're pretty swell places to visit.”

“You just want to look at the art.”

“Well, yeah.” Steve rolls over, grinning at him. His overgrown friend had a bath earlier, and hasn’t greased his hair back yet. It’s getting long, falling in his face. Bucky reaches up, automatically, to push it more or less back where it’s supposed to be. Steve just smiles wider. “Like you mind.”

Hell, he loves that smile.

Steve might have changed, put on armor underneath his skin, a living, breathing weapon for the Allies. 

But that smile, that smile didn’t change.

“We’ll go anywhere you want to go, Steve,” Bucky promises.

Steve winds their fingers together, and pulls Bucky on top of him.

Away from the pain - the unbearable agony of whatever the hell it is they’re doing to him.

And kisses away the taste of blood that’s filling the air, so thick Bucky can’t hardly breathe.

+++++

_Hold him, goddammit! Hold him!_

_I am doing my best here…_

_I’ve watched you stop missiles, mid-flight…_

_If I hold any tighter I’ll crush his arm!_

_Then crush it! Crush it, Erik! Or would you have him kill us both before we can get us out of here?!_

_You are being quite overdramatic, Charles…_

_I am not the one who wanted to storm a KGB stronghold in East Berlin, with me in a wheelchair, in search of something you found in the files of a US government official whom you murdered! After promising me you wouldn’t murder him!_

_Oh come, Charles, he was a bloody Nazi._

_The point remains, I will be as dramatic as I damn well..._

_Charles! Behind you!_

Bullets splatter the wall, the whine of gunfire familiar as a lover’s voice.

That noise, the sound of war, it just never stops.

But that noise, the sound of solid steel crumpling like cheap tin…

+++++

“Hey, you holding up okay?”

Steve. The one bright spot in this whole ugly business, his star in the mud and the smoke of the Allies’ push west across the continent. He’s so different than he used to be, back when they were both boys and imaginary beasts from Brooklyn’s sewers were the only thing they had to slay. Steve needed him back then.

Now, it seems, Steve’s the one who takes care of him.

Bucky huffs, and falls back on his cot, wool blankets itching him, even through his thick winter fatigues. 

“I thought I saw him again.”

“Who?”

“That boy. Erik.”

“He’s safe, Bucky. Back in England now. He sent us a letter last week, remember?”

He picks at the blanket. “Yeah, I remember. Poor kid. Seemed so broken up, saying goodbye.”

Steve laughs. Laughs his rich, warm laugh that sounds like home. He sits down next to him, letting Bucky lean into him reflexively. “We’ll have to write him.”

Bucky nods. He feels strange, disconnected somehow, even though Steve’s shoulder is firm against his cheek. It’s always been enough, coming back from all the horrible things they have to do. “We have any missions coming up?”

Steve goes quiet. “I don’t think so,” he finally says. “I can’t think of any I’ve seen on the roster.”

“Oh.”

Strange. 

Very strange.

There are normally a lot of missions. Hard things, things nobody else can do. His.

Bucky stares at his lap, where Steve’s slid a hand across his left arm.

He can’t feel it.

+++++

_Why isn’t he waking up?_

_I don’t know. Hank doesn’t know. The drugs are mostly out of his system, so it cannot be that alone. We’re sequencing his DNA to see if we can find some kind of clue about his mutation._

_What about the implants?_

_You did crush that abominable arm. If you’d like to remove it..._

_It’s not just the arm, Charles. It’s inside of him. Metal. I can feel it._

_Perhaps more x-rays are in order._

_I can guide them out by sensation. No need to waste the film._

_You’d best do it before he comes down off these drugs Zola’s people had him on._

_Do you think it has something to do with his mutation?_

_It must. According to these charts, they have him on enough tranquilizers to drop an elephant. Delayed aging, heightened sensitivity to pain..._

_Perhaps along the same lines as Logan’s powers, then._

_We must allow him to wake, before you attempt to recruit him into your Brotherhood._

_I have no intention of doing anything of the sort._

+++++

“Corporal Barnes, I was going over your debriefing notes from your last mission,” says a British colonel he’s never seen before, young and dark-haired and handsome, gray eyes keen, fixed entirely on him. Xavier, engraved on the pin over his heart. For a moment, Bucky doesn’t recognize where they are, this clean white room with its stainless steel fixtures. There’s nothing like this in camp. Where the hell are they? “I wanted to ask you a few questions about it.”

He shakes his head. The white doesn’t go away. He can hear machines beeping. Goddamn. Is it the hospital? How did he end up back in the hospital. “I’ve said everything I want to say about that camp.”

The colonel makes a note in the margins of the file he’s got out in front of him, nodding. “Camps, yes, exactly. General MacArthur’s become very disturbed over the latest reports on these camps, coming from the front, and asked me to oversee a special commission to bring him a direct report.”

“A direct report?” Bucky asks, angry now. “You mean they don’t believe us?”

“Seems Churchill is having a hard time convincing the country that such atrocities are taking place.”

“This is happening in other places?”

“Yes, Corporal. We’re finding many camps that seem to have been purpose-built for mass executions. Jews, it appears. We believe this is what the Nazis meant by the Final Solution.”

Bucky swallows, trying to imagine that. The same thing they saw at Zola's camp. Everywhere. But… “Killing? Just killing?”

“Just killing?” the young colonel repeats, eyes narrowing dangerously. 

“I spent time in one of these places,” Bucky replies, memories rising around him, the very light seeming to drain from the room. He closes his eyes and thinks about spring sunlight falling on the floor of his kitchen, their little tenement apartment warm with it, Steve across the table from him, talking about a new commission he just picked up through the WPA.

Happy.

They were happy then.

They’re happy now.

+++++

_It pains you, doesn’t it? Seeing me like this?_

_Don’t be a fool. I’m glad to see you at all._

_I see your face, when you look at the chair. You are disgusted with me._

_It my failure I am disgusted with._

_It’s your obsession with being our savior that’s your failing, Erik._

_It was not my intention to hurt you, to see you hurt. Not like this._

_What’s past is past, my friend._

_Would that I could believe that._

+++++

War was declared three days ago.

Steve wants to enlist.

“There’s no way you’ll qualify!” Bucky is yelling at him, not caring who among their neighbors can hear. “And even if you did, you... what are you going to do?!”

“My part!” Steve yells back. His face has gone pale with rage, fists clenched so tight at his sides his nails are probably digging under the skin. 

“And who’s gonna take care of you out there?”

“I don’t need to be taken care of! Why won’t you get that through your head?!”

“Yes you do!” 

The painting in the kitchen falls off its easel. 

Bucky goes to pick it up, but he doesn’t recognize it. Gone is the palate Steve normally favors, the sweeping lines and bright colors that he says aren’t so much a reflection of the way things are, but how they should be. The half-finished canvas is a ruin now, but he can see the scene that was there.

A stark room, equipment set into the walls, a metal chair tangled with wires, set in the middle. It looks like something out of _Brave New World_.

The chair’s got a figure in it.

Bucky can hear it screaming.

“Are you boys alright?” It’s one of the neighbors, standing in the doorway to their tiny apartment. Bucky doesn’t recognize him, but it has to be a neighbor... it is, it a neighbor, Charles, moved in a few weeks ago. British.

“We’re fine,” he says.

“Fights are normal, in a healthy relationship, you know. Nothing to be ashamed o...”

“We’re roommates, that’s it.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest...”

“We’re old friends. That’s it.”

Charles leans on the old plaster of the wall outside. “Seems like more than that, to me.”

“And who said you had the right to ask?”

“Whatever you think you needed to protect him from, James, I’m sure you did. You need to forgive yourself.”

“For what?”

Charles holds up the painting. “For this.”

The paint’s run. 

Red in the gray morass of it now. 

The color of blood.

Bucky takes the disgusting thing in both hands, slams the door in Charles’ face, and smashes it to pieces.

+++++

_Surely you can speed this up. He talks to you. He eats when we give him food. Why is he so unresponsive?_

_The mind is not a box to simply be opened, Erik. This damage is complex, and sustained, stretching back three decades, if Zola’s notes are to be believed. I cannot reach in and simply undo it._

_But he is in agony!_

_And since when do you care about the agony of a human?_

_I…_

_Yes? I’m sure the answer will be fascinating._

_He is not a mere human. Not a mutant, no, but something, certainly. A metahuman, perhaps, we could say._

_And you would help one of these metahumans, as if they were us?_

_He must have faced the same challenges we face, always having to hide…_

_Are you speaking of his powers, this thing in him Hank and I cannot identify? Or something more personal?_

_I’m not sure what you’re talking about._

_Yiddish runs through his thoughts._

_I suppose you think that must mean something..._

_He also thinks about a man. Tall, blond, very handsome, built like an Aryan tank, but hardly a Nazi..._

_Captain America?_

_I didn’t realize you had an interest in cheesy American war propaganda._

_No, Captain America was a real soldier, he… he was real. But both he and Colonel Barnes vanished before the end of the war._

_What aren’t you telling me about your connection to this man? This is personal for you._

_I believed he was a mutant._

_Erik, don’t walk away from me… talk to me, dammit!_

+++++

“We never got around to talking about the camp, did we?”

It’s Colonel Xavier again.

The man just will not leave him alone.

The world is dark, outside this room. Like this room is the only room, the entire universe this space alone. Like that play he and Steve see together in Paris, a few months after the Commandos come together and they finally get a few days’ leave for themselves. Steve translates for him, voice soft and low in the dim lights of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.

An eternity, spent in a single room. The starkest vision of Hell he’s ever contemplated.

Steve loves things like this.

“How about we go back to the hotel, and I’ll show you what we’d do, if we were stuck in a room together forever,” Steve whispers, teasing and serious together, a grin his voice as they pass under the Paris streetlights...

The colonel clears his throat.

Why does everything unreal feel so close these days?

“As I said, we don’t know the full scale yet of what the Nazis are doing. I’d like you to help me understand, son.” 

“You say there are other camps,” Bucky says, with great effort, wanting to follow Steve back to the absolutely lovely room they were given. Watch his lover sink to his knees and swallow him down. Take all the pain of this endless fucking war away, if only for a little while. “What about experiments?”

“Experiments? Run on children, like Erik Lehnsherr?”

“I don’t know what they were doing to him. The camp commander seemed to be keeping him like a pet. A few of the guards we captured mentioned seeing him bend the metal gates when he was brought it. Twisted them. I believe I submitted a report, on the files we found.” He tries not to sound irritated, but between Howard and Colonel Phillips and Howard again, he’s answered about a thousand questions about Erik. Poor kid. So young, with all that baked-in rage.

“With his hands?”

“With his mind,” Bucky snaps. He can’t focus on this. He hurts everywhere. He can’t feel his left arm.

The colonel cocks his head. “Tell me, Corporal Barnes, are you experiencing battle fatigue?”

He bristles. “Of course not, sir. I’m solid.”

“We’re finding it’s fairly common amongst men who’ve have spent prolonged periods of time at the front…”

“I’m no coward!”

The colonel doesn’t make a note on that at all. “You just don’t seem surprised. A boy who can bend metal. That’s very unusual. Impossible, some would say.”

And he can’t do anything but laugh. Helpless. Because if he can watch his best friend, his scrawny, fragile, sickly friend, transform into a demigod overnight… “Between Red Skull, Howard Stark, and Steve, sir, I don’t think there’s much that could surprise me anymore.”

“Steve? Steve Rogers?”

“Yeah. Captain America.”

He isn’t sure how he gets back to quarters. Just that he does, and when he does, Steve’s right there, already in bed, mostly asleep, only just awake enough to curl an arm around Bucky, as Bucky crawls in beside him. The arm that settles around his is different than it used to be; bigger, heavier. But the breath that ghosts across Bucky’s skin carries the same sweetness, the warmth of his skin the same comfort, the sense of purpose that drives him on.

Bucky closes his eyes.

He doesn’t want to think about the camps.

He dreams about death anyway. His hand, dipped in molten steel, ripping a man’s throat clean out.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t feel it.

He can’t let himself feel it.

If he feels it, it becomes real.

“Hell,” Steve translates quietly for him, the characters on stage exhausted after attempting to murder each other, “is other people.”

+++++

_I have seen you freeze entire rooms of armed men, push your thoughts into dozens of others. Why can you not help him?_

_His mind has found a comfortable place for itself, a nest in the good memories of the war. He refuses to be dislodged from it._

_Why the war? There were no good memories there._

_He has a few. But he’s not ready to leave them._

_He must, Charles. You must make him understand._

_Erik, sometimes the mind must discover things for itself. If he is not ready to face his past..._

What is his past?

They’ve had him assassinating people, from what I can see, but’s it’s bloody difficult to access it. With the drug regimen they had him on, Hank says he might not even have been able to form memories at all.

Medically induced amnesia?

I am not sure, but I do believe such a solution would be far more effective than some kind of brainwashing effort focused at destroying his moral center. There’s much we don’t know about the way the human mind stores information. Better to simply turn a man’s psyche off, perhaps, than attempt to twist it into something fundamentally different. 

But he’s still in there.

Very much so.

Why is he hiding?

Perhaps he’s not. Perhaps he’s searching for something.

+++++

Steve’s not Jewish.

But somehow, he still manages to get a chaplain in, in time for the Passover _seder_.

It’s one of their traditions. Bucky goes to church with him on Christmas Eve. Steve washes their plates and cleans the pantry and bakes matzo. 

This year, the whole unit joins in.

They’ll find Erik a week later.

And it’s one of the things on Bucky’s mind, as he unstraps the boy from the table, speaking to him in English, then broken German, then what Yiddish he remembers.

Steve comes back, fifteen minutes later, pale, looking like he wants to kill somebody.

Bucky, from his position on the floor, holds a finger up against his lips in a simple plea for silence, Erik screaming into his shoulder.

Screaming and screaming and screaming.

It feels like he’s been listening to that scream his entire life.

+++++

_He rescued you._

_Charles…_

_There’s no reason to lie to me about this. None. So why did you keep it from me?_

_Perhaps I do not want to remember it myself._

_You were not so careful with your past, when we were hunting Shaw._

_But we were hunting him then. You and I. Together._

_I came with you, to rescue this man, did I not?_

_We’ve not rescued him yet, have we? And we won’t, if you insist on this plan. Putting a HYDRA weapon in the coma ward at Walter Reid..._

_He’s safe. I’ve undone the physiological damage the human doctors did to him, and you’ve dismantled the arm. He won’t hurt anyone._

_We cannot just abandon him to a bloody VA clinic somewhere!_

_It’s been a month, Erik. I don’t now what else I can do. I have school starting in a few weeks, and…_

_…and you cannot have me in the mansion._

Quiet. The space around him is quiet. 

For a long, long span.

_Those are decisions you made, my friend._

_I know, Charles. I know._

+++++

The white floors are awash in moonlight, a gorgeous night. It’s quiet, not even the murmur of artillery in the distance. Not the front then. Paris perhaps. Steve should be asleep next to him. Steve should be with him. Steve should be...

“Captain America vanished. At the end of the war,” a voice says as if out of a dream, and there’s the sound of whirring as the bed he’s laying tilts up.

“Who the hell are you?” he demands, staring at the man seated at the foot of his bed.

A man just beyond reach of the light from the windows. 

His fingers are turning, like he’s playing with a pen.

“I was distraught you know, when I heard the news that Corporal Bucky Barnes, of the Howling Commandos, had died. You pulled me from that place. Gave me a chance at a real life, instead of the one you have lived, I do believe.”

“Who are you?”

“You don’t remember me, Corporal?” The man flicks his hand, fingers spreading out flat as if in offering.

A ball bearing hangs in the air, a scant few inches from Bucky’s face.

And things make sense again.

Of course.

HQ. The reclaimed bedroom, home to people who have long since fled as the Allies push forward, where he and Steve bunk together in between missions. He’s just propped up, arm hurt on some mission. 

But that man... that man should be...

“Erik,” he says. “You’ve gotten pretty big for only being away for a half year or so.”

“Half a year? Is that all the time you remember?”

“Something like that,” Bucky replies, guarded.

“It’s been closer to thirty.”

“Thirty?”

“Charles doesn’t want to tell you that. He doesn’t want to tell you anything,” the man says, young English warring with old German in his accent. Bucky’s spent enough time on the front to recognize both. “But I think you’re strong enough to handle it, Corporal Barnes.”

“Handle what?”

The man’s teeth twist into a smile, lupine, dangerous.

“Liberation.”

+++++

It’s daytime. Past dawn, the chill winds it always brings.

Bucky can’t feel his arm, but at least he can see why.

There’s nothing but a stump there.

He can’t remember how he lost it.

He can’t remember anything, after falling from the train. Cold, snow, the flakes piling up as his blood froze into them, some fat fuck German smiling at him with evil glee in his horn-rimmed eyes, pain...

There’s a file beside the bed he’s laying in. Something written in a smooth, confident hand on the manila cover.

_leyenen mir atsind_

And as he leafs through it with his remaining good hand, scans it with fevered eyes and aching heart, Bucky remembers the dream he had last night.

Erik Lehnsherr. All grown up.

Remembers all the dreams he’s had.

How long he’s been wandering, through memory and longing and moments that belonged to both of them. Trying to find something that’s gone. Someone who’s been gone a long, long time.

 _I couldn’t save mine, either,_ Erik had told him last night. _I’ll carry that regret to the end of my days. But life goes on, Corporal Barnes. You must find a way to endure._

_How?_

_They took you from Steve, didn’t they?_

Tucking the folder under the remains of his arm, Bucky pulls himself out of bed.

Maybe it doesn’t need to be revenge. Steve wouldn’t want that for him. But Steve is gone. And HYDRA - the taste of blood burned into the back of his throat - remains.

This place he’s in feels old, old as Brooklyn, paneling dark with a thousand touches from passing years, floors worn, comfortable beneath his bare feet. It could be Europe still, but somehow, it feels like home. 

It’s not the HQ.

Erik might have thought he was doing Bucky a favor, saving him, by telling him what he told him. How they'd gone after a terminally ill Zola, trying to stop him from being appointed to some position on Nixon's staff. How they'd found his information in Zola's files. Come for him. Pulled him out of some nightmare control facility. Tried to reach him, tried everything they could to pull him back out into 1974 America, this terrible world where Steve vanished decades ago...

Low voices, too quiet for him to rightfully hear, guide him into a kitchen, full of light.

Low voices that belong to two men, sitting at a little table against the wall. One in a wheelchair. One covered in blue fur.

Strange world.

“Excuse the interruption, guys,” he says, having to hang on to the doorjamb for support, overgrown hair falling in his eyes, “but could one of you point me in the direction of Peggy Carter? She and I need to have a conversation about some things.”


End file.
